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John irving's a prayer for5/24/2023 The World According to Garp sold over three million copies in its six-month occupation of the American bestseller lists and was awarded the 1980 National Book Award. "I told her not to worry," laughs Leggett, "and I explained that John's novels never sell very many copies. It was published in 1978, three years after Irving had left Iowa, and shortly after publication a student expressed her surprise to Leggett that one of its characters had the same name as her. John Leggett was the workshop director and recalls a colleague suggesting Irving as "something of a charity case", but it was while at Iowa that Irving published his third novel (The 158-Pound Marriage) and worked on his fourth, a book that would be his most ambitious project to date. His first two books, Setting Free the Bears (1969) and The Water-Method Man (1972) had been reviewed both widely and appreciatively, but he made ends meet by teaching and accepted a post at the prestigious writers' workshop at Iowa University where he had been a postgraduate student a few years earlier. I n 1972, John Irving found himself in the frustrating position, familiar to many young novelists, of being unable to make a living from writing fiction.
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